http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/arts/music/20bloc.html

The Weather Makes Way for a Reunion
By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: September 20, 2004

One of the best outdoor concerts of the summer took place on Saturday, at the last possible moment, as a drizzly afternoon gave way to the year's first chilly autumn night. The concert, starring the reunited Fugees, was billed as a "block party" by its organizer, the comedian Dave Chappelle. But it was also - perhaps mainly - a movie set: the director Michel Gondry was recording the whole thing for a concert film, which helps explain both the impressive lineup and the slow pacing.

There were no second takes, but there was lots of down time, which meant Mr. Chappelle had to find creative ways to kill it. Early on he commandeered the bongos for some fake protest poetry. "Five thousand black people, chillin' in the rain," he intoned - an overstatement. "Nineteen white people, peppered in," he added - an understatement.

The location was a well-guarded secret - a bit too well-guarded, perhaps. Tickets were free, but to get them you signed up online, filled out a casting questionnaire, then showed up at a secret location in Chinatown at 11 a.m., from which you would (eventually) be bused to an out-of-the-way street corner in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, at the L-shaped intersection of Quincy and Downing Streets. The whole process sounds as complicated as one of Mr. Gondry's playful but rigorous music videos, so maybe this was his idea. Who else would turn a concert into a treasure hunt?

There weren't nearly enough people to fill up the block (despite radio announcements on the day of the show advertising the location), but hundreds of concertgoers stuck it out, partly shielded from the elements by free ponchos that resembled oversize sandwich bags; no doubt Mr. Gondry enjoyed the strange sight.

Still, none of this was any stranger than the reunion of the Fugees, the rap trio that has only grown in stature since the release of its second and - so far - final album in 1996, "The Score." The group's name has come to symbolize hip-hop bohemia, and it was memorably adjectivized by Kanye West in a rhyme about a materialistic lover: "Five years ago, you was so Fugees/Now you don't want nothing unless it costs a few g's."

Yet the members themselves don't seem to spend much time happily reminiscing about the early days. Just last year one of them, Wyclef Jean, was offering gentle correction and friendly advice to his former bandmate Pras on a track whose title labeled Pras a fake. And since the huge success of her 1998 solo debut, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," Ms. Hill, the third member, has mainly avoided the spotlight, surfacing for a tumultuous "MTV Unplugged" acoustic session during which she broke down crying.

So it was a shock and a thrill to see all three of them creeping through "Fu-Gee-La" once again. A few songs later Mr. Jean rhymed, "Jay-Z said, 'The Fugees gon' break up'/He ain't even know, one day we'd make up," and the crowd ignored the form (the easy rhyme, the clunky meter) in order to cheer the content.

Then it was Ms. Hill's turn, starting with, "Killing Me Softly With His Song": she sang the first verse nearly a cappella, building tension, maybe even despair, that dissipated only when the joyful hip-hop beat finally arrived. Near the end she circled around a marvelously ambivalent three-word phrase: "Singing my life, singing my life, singing my life."

What came next was even better: Ms. Hill's "Lost Ones," which has always sounded like a thinly veiled swipe at Mr. Jean. On Saturday night Mr. Jean strummed his guitar and smiled while Mr. Hill rapped on one side of him ("It's funny how money change a situation/Miscommunication leads to complication/My emancipation don't fit your equation") and Pras angrily (and half-seriously?) gestured on the other; it was the kind of performance that made you glad someone was filming.

The Fugees were joined by like-minded hip-hop and R&B acts: Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, the Roots, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Dead Prez. These fellow travelers are often tagged with the stultifying label "socially conscious," and they used to present themselves as an urgent alternative to money-hungry mainstream hip-hop. But on Saturday they seemed more like friends than comrades. Mr. Kweli spit tightly constructed verses from his forthcoming album, "The Beautiful Struggle" (Geffen), and Common and Ms. Badu, apparently recovered from a rather public breakup, reunited for a couple of love songs: "Love of My Life" (hers) and "The Light" (his).

In some ways, though, the day's most important performer was the rapper-producer Mr. West, whose brilliant debut album, "The College Dropout" (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam), proudly courts both Fugees fans and "costs a few-g's" fans - slyly admitting along the way that most listeners are a bit of both. Backed by a band led by Questlove, Mr. West rapped his way through "We Don't Care" (an ambivalent ode to drug dealers) and "Spaceship" (in which he recounts a disastrous - and larcenous - tenure at the Gap).

Mr. West noted that he would probably be the only rapper onstage all day wearing diamonds, but he seemed to like being slightly out of place, the way he always is. Best of all, in a day filled with special guests, Mr. West had the best and weirdest one: Freeway, a fierce, bearded ranter from Philadelphia, who showed up 20 minutes too late to perform his verse in Mr. West's track, "Two Words."

No matter. Freeway rapped anyway, barreling through a verse from "What We Do," rhyming a cappella until Questlove joined in. "When the teeth stop showing/And the stomach start growling/Then the heat start flowing," he snarled, giving the friendly block party the one thing it might otherwise have lacked: an antihero.

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